Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't. "
David Shields
Day
Writing
Find
Related Quotes:
" From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life. "
David Shields
Me
Life
War
" I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful. "
David Shields
Think
Without
Hateful
" The only rule is never be bored. "
David Shields
Bored
Only
Never
" The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition. "
David Shields
Burden
Explore
Our
" Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. "
David Shields
You
Death
Information
" People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me. "
David Shields
People
Bore
Like
" Sports movies are often very good at dramatizing the intersection of public and private realms: the body politic. "
David Shields
Movies
Sports
Very
" The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. "
David Shields
Cling
Fervently
Novel
" From the first slave ship arriving in harbor, America stole and judged blacks. Black life that didn't fit into white logic was commercially exploited or lynched. "
David Shields
Black
White
Life
" I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books. "
David Shields
Read
Other
Just
" The N.F.L.'s rule on underclassmen should be abolished, and the N.B.A. should be discouraged from adding an age limit. "
David Shields
Age
Should
Discouraged
" I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X. "
David Shields
Person
Book
Know
" I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense. "
David Shields
Culture
Violence
Language
" I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'. "
David Shields
Some
Stories
Those
" I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form. "
David Shields
Bored
Form
Am
" We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense. "
David Shields
You
Confused
Remember
" I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write. "
David Shields
Want
Pay
Rent
" The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time. "
David Shields
Page
Time
Why
" Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever. "
David Shields
Work
Cut
Writer
" I think the core of fans' relationship is one that vacillates schizophrenically and mercurially from reverence to resentment. Fans fetishize the players' athletic genius and both deify it and demonize it; witness the way awe turns into anger whenever a player holds out or flips off the offensive coordinator. "
David Shields
Anger
Think
Relationship
" I'm a sucker for sports movies. "
David Shields
Movies
Sucker
Sports
" Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture: to reflect back its 'whatness,' refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness. "
David Shields
Reflect
Kind
Through
" You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing. "
David Shields
Book
Amazing
You
" I try to be as honest as I possibly can about the contradictions within my own heart and thereby get to something 'true' and revealing and important about contemporary American culture and human nature. "
David Shields
Heart
American
True
" The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling. "
David Shields
Me
People
Page
" Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I'm a big believer in is talking about everything until you're blue in the face. "
David Shields
Blue
Me
Talking
" One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time. "
David Shields
Time
Myself
Mother
" We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem. "
David Shields
Talk
Ice
Girl
" A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. "
David Shields
Focus
Lie
Lying
" The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms. "
David Shields
More
Literature
Key